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One of the greatest minds of our times, Thomas Sowell, words it this way:

"When Jonas Salk applied to selective Townsend Harris High School in New York, and later to the then-selective City College of New York (CCNY), there might well have been some other student, not quite as academically qualified, who could have been admitted instead, on the basis of having overcome greater handicaps than Jonas Salk had.

But the relevant question is: Would that other student have been equally likely to create a vaccine that would banish the scourge of polio?"

2 comments

It's a bit absurd to suggest that on individual high school admissions questions depend the cure for polio or the equivalent.

> CCNY

A great example of the benefits of free higher education, but in terms of selectivity the problem is that Salk didn't get to go to the Ivy League or MIT or Cal Tech or some other elite science school.

>But the relevant question is: Would that other student have been equally likely to create a vaccine that would banish the scourge of polio?"

We'll never know, because that other student was racially profiled and denied an opportunity on that basis.

True. The horrible truth is that affirmative action cuts both ways; it can give advantages to under-represented groups, but only at the expense of the majority. Admissions is a zero-sum game. Every student admitted is a spot not available to someone else.

It a horrible system, but so is every other system. What you can say for affirmative action is that it tries to game the system towards those who generally get screwed over otherwise.

Education is a zero sum game for the applicants. But it's not a zero sum game in total. The university and society as a whole gain a greater benefit from the student with the higher potential getting the place. All other things being equal the candidate who is smartest when they apply will maximize the resultant graduate.

You could formalize it as y=mx+c where C is the candidates current education level, m is the candidate's innate ability to learn and x is the quality of the course, and y is the final quality of the candidate after getting the degree.

All other things are not equal though, and making a judgement only about the C of each candidate does not maximize y. SATs measure C, affirmative action does a really crappy job of trying to estimate m.

I like this way of framing it, although I find it questionable whether SATs, grades, etc measure C exclusively.

Because almost all candidates are the same age when applying, C also carries information about m, in the sense that the same equation applies to their time in K-12, so candidates with a high C did so either because they had a high learning rate (m) or went to a high-quality high school or had a high-quality environment (x), or some combination.

Thus I would say that SAT score measures mx. C at time t = mx + C at t - 1, or dC/dt = mx. Schools are interested in m, which is not easily measurable directly. Affirmative action is a very crude way to look for candidates that have a high m, low x, and moderate to high C at application time.

My conclusion is that if it were possible, colleges would ideally look for candidates that performed substantially better on SATs etc than their peers at each high school, as that would control for x and allow you to estimate m. Affirmative action, on the other hand, is a cruder but partially functional way to do this, as it uses race as a bad proxy for x.

> affirmative action cuts both ways

... and that also happens in a different way than I think the parent refers to:

When American Major League Baseball, the top professional leagues, began (very gradually) hiring black and Latino players in 1947, it was not affirmative action. In fact it was the end of an affirmative action program for white guys - they had all these jobs specially reserved for them based on their skin color. Many of them were minor-league quality players, who only had their jobs because their skin was white. Generations of black and Latino players simply couldn't get a decent job (the Negro Leagues paid relatively poorly), including some of the best players ever.

(Incidentally, this also helped the statistics of the best players, who regularly batted/pitched against minor leaguers - how many home runs could a modern star hit if maybe a third of the pitchers he faced were minor leaguers?).

The same happens still in other fields - lots of people with jobs that they wouldn't have if they weren't white, male, coming from wealth, etc.

>What you can say for affirmative action is that it tries to game the system towards those who generally get screwed over otherwise.

Judging people on their immutable characteristics is always ignorant, counterproductive, and polarizing by definition. There are a myriad of ways for us to help people who have been generally screwed by society that don't involve judging them based on their race or other physical traits. A color blind, class-based affirmative action system would be far, far preferable to anything that Harvard or other proponents of race-based affirmative action are doing. Give an automatic bonus to people who went to school in a poverty stricken area. Give an automatic bonus to those whose parents didn't graduate from college. There are tens of millions of poor, white Americans whose families have lived generations in poverty who rightfully seethe while they sit in their sweltering, air-condioner-free trailers and listen to rich, entitled people talk about the "historic privilege" of whites.

This is a very popular argument on HN.

Its premise is that there isn't a legacy of race-based discrimination that penalized non-white people and that is still felt today. That's, if not an extraordinary claim, at least a sweeping one: within my lifetime, there were whole areas of my home city that blacks were preventing from owning homes in, and even today, comparing a white and black family of identical incomes, the black family will live in a neighborhood where the average income is sharply lower than that of the white family.

If you don't engage with that issue, you're left with the mere observation that there are multiple factors that work against different groups of people. Perhaps we should account for more of those factors. But it doesn't follow logically that we should stop accounting for the factors that hold black families back.

> you're left with the mere observation that there are multiple factors that work against different groups of people. Perhaps we should account for more of those factors. But it doesn't follow logically that we should stop accounting for the factors that hold black families back.

Indeed there are. But in practical terms, there are so many things that happened in the past to people that disadvantage them today (e.g., grandpa had polio) that it is impossible in practice to account for all of them.

If we however take some factors, generally the ones that are easy to observe such as race, and try to address them without addressing the rest, that is textbook selection bias. So the logical argument against (semi-exclusively) accounting for the factors that hold black families back is that it would be selection bias to do so.

Furthermore, advocates of affirmative action rarely answer the very important question "how will we know when the policy is successful and past discrimination has been offset by present advantage?"

The only reasonable answer I can think of is "when members of the discriminated group have equal outcomes on average to nondiscriminated groups on average". But if this is true, then given the above, the logical way to proceed is to target underprivileged people individually, as that is the only way you will ever get such equity over all the different factors.

Aren't the indicators we're looking for pretty straightforward? Don't we have a lot of simple, empirical evidence that we're not finished with the task of correcting for centuries of discrimination yet? It seems like the data is pretty straightforward.

Of course. There is however a subtle but important distinction between talking about (race-based) "past discrimination" (RBPD) versus any "past disadvantage" (such as grandpa with polio).

It is this limitation of focus to RBPD that I'm objecting to. First, I think it is a form of selection bias, as I said.

Selection bias is a big issue in politics -- I have found that climate activists like my wife hate hearing "we can deal with climate later once we've solved poverty" -- because they very reasonably know that "later" in politics means "never", and they interpret this statement to mean "poverty is more important than climate".

Interestingly, I think this is what is going on in reverse when affirmative action advocates hear people say "We should do something about RBPD, but poverty is even worse, we should focus on that first". AA advocates hear "RBPD is unimportant and we'll do it later (never)".

Perhaps you could help me with the following summary of every discussion I've had about this topic:

- Why do we care about RBPD?

Because it has lingering bad effects.

- But so does any form of past disadvantage. Why then do we focus on RBPD?

Because we have to start somewhere, and we don't have enough bandwidth to focus on everything.

- OK, but wouldn't it be simpler then to target disadvantaged individuals rather than disadvantaged groups because then we wouldn't have to solve the impossible problem of quantifying everyone's group-based net advantages and disadvantages? And also, if you adjust outcomes based on group outcomes, rather than individual outcomes (poverty), won't it be impossible to ever balance the ledger, because every time you give an advantage to one group, you disadvantage another, some members of which are disadvantaged on other axes?

And this is where it breaks down. The answer usually given is "Don't you believe in RBPD? It is horrible and there is plenty of evidence it exists!" But this doesn't answer the question at all. I've already agreed RBPD exists.

The only answer I can think of is perhaps that we should distinguish between problems caused by society (slavery) and problems not caused by society (polio), and to say that society only has an obligation to fix the former. But in this case, it becomes an issue of justice rather than outcome, and we are no longer justifying affirmative action on the basis of current bad outcomes but rather on past injustice. And if you do that, then you lose the ability to ever say when the ledger has been balanced and consequently remedies will have to go on forever.

>Its premise is that there isn't a legacy of race-based discrimination that penalized non-white people

That's completely wrong. The premise is that race-based discrimination is a terrible evil. You don't remedy the evils of the past by doubling down on the same ignorant policies.

You can argue that the evils of race-based discrimination against black families ended long enough ago that they are no longer felt today --- again, a sweeping claim --- but I don't see how you can argue that they are, but that we are obligated to do nothing about them.

By the logic you're employing, there has been no point in the history of the US where any kind of active support for black families has been justifiable; all of it constituted some form of "race-based discrimination".

Further, I'm a little curious about how you manage to square that logic with your call for class-based discrimination. Why is it OK to discriminate against children born to families of means, but not to discriminate against non-minority families? In neither case did the child have any say in where they ended up.

>You can argue that the evils of race-based discrimination against black families ended long enough ago that they are no longer felt today

Nobody can credibly argue this, and it isn't the argument I'm making.

> but I don't see how you can argue that they are, but that we are obligated to do nothing about them.

I'm not arguing that. I'm saying that we need help all people who are suffering in poverty, regardless of whether that resulted from race-based discrimination or any other social-ill, which are many.

>By the logic you're employing, there has been no point in the history of the US where any kind of active support for black families has been justifiable;

I'm saying its always wrong to treat people different based on the color of their skin, no matter what your intention or goal.

>Why is it OK to discriminate against children born to families of means, but not to discriminate against non-minority families?

Because wealth and power are not immutable characteristics. By definition the wealthy and the powerful have advantages is society. No wealthy and powerful child is suffering because a poor and powerless child got a hand up. Malik Obama doesn't need a hand up, while the white child who lives in a shack in the mountains of Appalachia certainly does.